You are here

Trouble with "energy"

Submitted by EvergreenAshes on Wed, 2013-09-25 16:31

After having tried Karezza a couple times, I decided that I would really like to back things up and try the exchanges, since things were getting a little hot and heavy from my partner's side. He agreed, we got the book and we're trying them out. Mostly things have been going well, but he has a hard time understanding and feeling comfortable with the idea of energy manipulation. He is an athiest, and was convinced there was nothing more to life until we did the excercise from this website where you feel the energy between your hands. That really freaked him out! Now when the directions say something like "send calming waves" I can just feel his uncomfortableness. He says he's trying to just pretend or visualize it, but he doesn't feel anything and he thinks it's kind of stupid. I told him I could feel it when he wasn't just feeling, when he was too in his head thinking about how dumb it was. He is a recovering addict, and in our conversations, I've figured out that he does not truly understand what intimacy means. Describing it gets me a blank stare. Don't get me wrong, there has definitely been progress and breakthroughs, I'm just not sure what advice to offer him about things outside of his comfort zone.

I'm an engineer and an agnostic, and the "woo" stuff doesn't do much for me either. I haven't done the exchanges. But I'm definitely an enthusiastic karezza fan. I've been practicing karezza for 3+ years now. I just feel better physically / mentally / emotionally, and my marriage has been much more peaceful and pleasant when I stay far away from orgasms.

Sounds like your partner just needs to understand that he needs to S-L-O-W D-O-W-N for your sake, and to immediately slow down or stop moving if you ask him to. Karezza is not about getting yourself or your partner heated up with lots of movement and friction. It's about enjoying the feelings of cuddling, skin-to-skin contact and sexual connection.

My partner and I don't feel comfortable with the "woo" or ritual either, so we didn't do the exchanges. instead we just cuddled at least twice a day, every day, skin to skin. Meditation, as a calm peaceful awareness, is compatible with cuddling.

At first, it feels awkward to be doing nothing, and it feels like nothing is happening, because we're so used to strong exciting sensations, instead of gentle soothing love filled ones. But as your systems calm down, and you become more sensitive, the bliss will surprise you.

I've interviewed quite a few Tantric couples who have had to deal with this problem. One partner is convinced that "spiritual energy" is real, and the other believes just as strongly that it's just a metaphor for a subjective phenomenon. What they've all found is that it really doesn't matter whether you agree on this as long as you find words that work for both of you, and as long as you are respectful of each other's views.

After two decades, my partner and I are both pretty well convinced that even the most bizarre effects of Tantra are subjective phenomena, byproducts of the way prolonged, deeply intimate sex floods the brain with unusual sensations that the mind struggles to interpret in terms of the "normal" world. But that doesn't change the fact that it really feels like there's something more than physical going on!

I'll be going into detail on some of the neuroscience over the next few weeks in my Tantra blog, if you're curious.

Nice to read your posts, everyone, and always love to hear from Quizure and Curiousfellow and Marnia on this subject (or any subject)!

I tried the exchanges briefly awhile back. But gave up. My wife has no interest in energy stuff or in reading anything to do with sex. But I do act "as if" the energy stuff is real and it seems real.

I went to acupuncture for while even though I didn't entirely buy Chi energy that it's premised on. I think it was of some benefit, who knows.

The key for us was daily naked cuddling and for me to stop pressuring my wife to my way of thinking. As things stand we have very frequent Karezza intercourse but sometimes she has one or more orgasms and I just delight in them and don't feel something is broken.

In fact she has more orgasms than she used to with "standard" sex. And for certain, I feel a lot more pleasure and loving feelings than I ever did in my entire life and it keeps getting better and better.

My girlfriend and I are seniors in college; she is a psychology major and I am a mechanical engineering major. She always tells me that I act with my head but that she acts with her heart. I am very much a reasons person where she is a feelings person.

For us Exchanges were problematic to begin with since we live in separate dorms, sleeping together every night just didn’t fit our situation. During the summers we have been living together but I didn’t notice any energy exchange from sleeping. We tried a couple things but they didn’t really do too much for either one of us—she may work from her heart but she isn’t a mystical thinker either.

So another engineering vote against the “woo” factor, and probably a psychology vote against also. It just didn’t make sense to us with the way we think, but like most here karezza does work for us without the “woo”. Karezza has been a definite plus in our relationship and we think kept us from repeating some past relationship mistakes.

It doesn’t look like we are getting any support for the more mystical elements here. Does anyone really have a feeling for that portion of the program or does it just not fit with most people here?

I haven't experienced any exchange of energy during Karezza but I think that's partly because the sensuality of the moment is usually too overwhelmingly strong to let any subtler perceptions in.

I never did the Exchanges so can't comment; but although I have a very sceptical side to me, I've done some exercises involving Chi energy harnessing and manipulation where it quickly became obvious I was handling something quite out of the ordinary. Chi energy then became as 'real' as the wind.

This required zero skill, beyond short term attentiveness, and was easily repeatable. There are lots of occasions in my life where I've been required to 'imagine' something that wasn't firmly grounded in reality, but this wasn't one of them. The energy I felt was substantial, pliable, and had appreciable texture; but it only endured as long as I paid attention to it.

I may have been a bit glib with my use of the word 'Chi', as the book I got the exercises from was about Pranic healing. Their word for the unseen energy they utilise is 'Prana'. Still, energy is energy, I suppose.

The book is called "Your hands can heal you", by Stephen Co. I bought it several years ago, but didn't get very far into it, despite finding I was able to feel the energy he talked of relatively easily. It's quite an involved book, but the exercises I followed (from Chapter five) were simple enough. I had a long standing hip complaint, which was why I bought the book, but I found I didn't have the patience to put the ideas into practice. I suspect I also harboured serious doubts any sort of unseen energy could affect muscular imbalances brought about by physical trauma.

As it happens, I still have the same hip problem, only marginally better over the years, despite endless prodding and pushing, by me and others; but recently, out of desperation, I visited an Oriental massage specialist, who told me my meridians were seriously out of whack. He said there was no need for me to believe this; what he did would work, anyway. What he does, besides massage, is acupuncture, 'cupping' and 'Guasha scraping', all designed to stimulate Chi. I've so far visited him twice, and there's been some extraordinary (frighteningly so, after being stuck for so long) muscular letting go - not during the session but over the succeeding days and weeks.

Let's begin with the notion that our understanding of things is at a very high level; in other words, what's actually happening in our bodies is much more detailed and complex than our ideas about it. Of course there are scientists, specialists and whatnot that know more than we do about it, but even their understanding is incomplete. So just because we can't see or measure or understand a phenomenon doesn't mean it isn't real. In fact, many phenomenon operate on a level that we can't understand. Worse yet, our attempts to understand them may even get in the way of their even happening, or at least alter the way they do (more on that later).

So if you don't believe the idea that it's possible to feel and even move energy in people's bodies, then maybe that's too big an idea, or at too high a level of abstraction. At molecular and atomic levels (even subatomic), there is a lot going on that involves energy directly in various ways. I think we can all agree on that without going into too many details.

Then there is the way our nerves work. They can sense very small happenings inside our bodies, and transmit these signals to our brains very quickly. The problem comes in with phenomenon whose signals are small to begin with. Mental noise (like trying to understand what's going on) can actually drown out this signal to the point where we can't hear it. That's probably a physical equivalent of the "observer effect" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_effect_(physics)).

Granted, some of these things are easier to believe than others. For example: I'm able to tell where my wife is feeling tension in her body. How can I do that? She doesn't have to tell me where it is, I can feel it. There isn't anything specific that I'm looking for. The harder I "look", the less I see. It's only when I relax and lean into my intuition that I can be sensitive enough to notice such things. I doubt anyone would have a hard time believing that I can do this. I'm probably picking up on tiny movements in her body, little sounds she's making unconsciously, etc.; Things that are observable if I'm paying enough attention to notice them. But I don't have a catalog of these things, nor can I intentionally look for them, so it's interesting in that way. Maybe there are other, subtler things I can sense too, even if I can't understand (or prove) them.

I think sensing and moving energy is a lot like that. Maybe we can't understand it (yet), and our attempts to understand it probably even get in the way. So I don't think it's "woo"; that's just a word people use when there is something they don't understand. Amidst a sea of crazy whackjobs touting all sorts of magical thinking like dowsers, psychics, etc., there have been a few people (actual scientists) who had a special insight into things other people couldn't understand. They were considered some of the most brilliant thinkers in history (Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Carl Jung, etc). They were able to accurately describe phenomenon that couldn't be seen or understood at the time because they operated at a level beyond our ability to measure or perceive them directly. They demonstrated that our prior lack of insight is not a proof of non-existence...there is no such thing.